News regarding Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is in constant turmoil. It may happen that vital information gets lost in the daily news flow and you miss important points.

This format is there to remedy that. We return to the news of the past week in the Crypto Weekly to keep you informed on the current situation of cryptocurrencies.

For the unmissable of this week, we are pleased to come back to Maciej’s article in which he returns to CoinJoin , an anonymization method available on Bitcoin.

Anonymity: a pillar of cryptocurrencies

The right to anonymity is strongly pushed by the majority of the ideologues of bitcoin . This is a sought after property to ensure a censorship resistant form of money .

The inventor of Bitcoin himself, Satoshi Nakamoto , withdrew completely from the internet without revealing his true identity only 2 years after launching the Bitcoin Rush protocol . This tradition of anonymity appears to carry on beyond Satoshi, as many Bitcoin developers are also anonymous .

CoinJoin: the evolution of mixers

Indeed, some of the most popular software in the Bitcoin universe is mixing software using CoinJoin technology .

First stated in a 2013 Bitcoin Talk discussion by famous Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell , CoinJoin technology has come a long way since then.

Like mixers on the darknet that often ended up being scammed because of their centralized form, mixing technologies using CoinJoin are infinitely more secure than their ancestors.

Companies and individuals who are concerned with the topic of privacy can now anonymize their digital assets without fear with relatively easy to operate software interfaces.

CoinJoin in practice

The CoinJoin method consists of creating a special transaction including several participants wishing to anonymize their coins. This transaction groups together several “inputs” coming from several sources (several participants) and includes a set of “outputs” with new addresses for the return of coins.

The goal is to break the link between the input that pays the output corresponding to it. The new UTXOs thus created will all have the same value so as not to be able to infer the origin of the inputs side.

The anonymity comes from the fact that probabilistically speaking, it is virtually impossible to guess from which address the output created originally came.

Please feel free to read the full article for more details on CoinJoin: „You Wo n’t Get My Bitcoins“ – Secrets of Mixing Bitcoin and CoinJoin